Library Duty Waste Of Fbi Time

May 5, 1989

Grudgingly, the FBI has agreed to release some of the information it has gathered in an amateurish cloak-and-dagger operation designed to rid the country`s libraries of communists.

The material was gathered by agents who have been hovering around checkout counters, urging librarians to keep eyes peeled for people who have Russian or East European-sounding names and show an interest in technical books about bombs and other military matters.

One hotbed of potential spies was located right here in South Florida. A librarian at the Broward County`s West Regional branch library in Plantation reported last summer that an FBI agent had tried to intimidate her into breaking a state law that protects the secrecy of book-checkout records.

FBI officials insisted then, and still do, that the program is not widespread and there has been no attempt to stomp on the civil rights of individuals using American public libraries.

That doesn`t jibe with the agreement the bureau has reached with the National Security Archives, a non-profit research center that collects declassified information.

A spokesman for the center said the FBI will process more than 3,000 pages of documents related to library surveillance in 13 states.

There is no graceful way to explain away this foolish waste of time or to justify it. If U.S. public libraries are indeed filled with military secrets, Soviet spymasters probably would send in agents named Smith and Jones, not Timoshenko and Molotov.

FBI`s spy-catching specialists should quietly assign their library lookouts to more productive duties.